


the needle and the thread

by paperclipbitch



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Community: dw_guestfest, Episode: s03e10 Blink, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-04
Updated: 2015-04-04
Packaged: 2018-03-21 06:53:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3682266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperclipbitch/pseuds/paperclipbitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Locked door mystery?” Larry asks when he walks in, hair damp from the rain outside, and Sally smiles and shrugs a shoulder and says: “something like that.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	the needle and the thread

**Author's Note:**

> Written for **dw_guestfest** on LJ, a fest/ficathon about minor _Who_ characters. Just squeaking into my posting date here!

Mostly, Sally can do this. Can walk around the world and not feel like every step of hers is being followed, can turn the lights off at night and not feel the need to flick them on again. She still shudders away from statues, but, well, that just seems like _logic_ , knowing what she knows.

She still likes closing all the curtains and slamming all the doors and turning the lights up blazingly high, though.

At first, she stuck it out and lived in her flat with every creak and dripping tap making her heart leap out of her chest, but in the end it made sense to live with someone who understood, who also wanted to spend nights back to back in the living room with their eyes wide open, taking it in turns to blink.

Larry’s keys in the door have her freezing automatically, fingertips numb against her book for a long moment, before she remembers and forces herself to move. 

“Locked door mystery?” he asks when he walks in, hair damp from the rain outside, and Sally smiles and shrugs a shoulder and says: “something like that.”

+

They’re teaching each other things, more or less: Sally owns more than seventeen DVDs now, though admittedly most of them also belong to Larry, and he’s read all her battered Agatha Christies and called her _Miss Marple_ often enough to relegate himself to the sofa for a night or two. Larry still hangs out on the internet half the time, but in the end decided not to tell the truth about the Easter Eggs and the Angels to his friends; the mystery was about two-thirds of the fun.

“We could be private investigators,” he tells Sally, mouth full, over breakfast. They’re in the shop neither of them can really afford to run, chipped mugs of tea and bacon sandwiches from the place down the street that gives them half off ever since they tracked down a set of bootlegs for the owner of this eighties show that only aired in Canada. Well, Larry did that bit, while Sally made the coffee and taught herself book restoration.

“You only like investigations that you can do on the internet,” Sally reminds him without venom. It’s too early for most of their customers, and she likes these bits; just them and the fruits of their labours and the radio down low.

“You used to like poking around in creepy empty houses,” Larry says.

Sally shrugs a shoulder. It made her thoughtful and it was all a bit _Famous Five_ but she doesn’t think she could ever do it again: there are too many _consequences_.

“And look how well that ended last time,” she sighs.

(She’s glad she has Larry; gladder than she thinks she’s ever let him see, really, and the world is different now, if not better, but. Well. She misses Kathy like a constant pain in her side, and she lied to Larry until she couldn’t lie anymore. He sat very still and said nothing and in the end Sally tugged at his shoulder until he fell into hers, uneven breathing against her throat, and she knotted her fingers into his hair and wouldn’t let go, not again, not another Nightingale.)

“We could only investigate things in well-lit crowded places?” Larry says, skipping lightly over the brittle memories in a way that Sally wants to but often can’t. “Or from the safety of our flat.”

Sally thinks _safety_ and _our flat_ and something warm uncurls somewhere inside her. She knocks their knees together.

“I knew I shouldn’t have got you that boxset of _Elementary_ for Christmas,” she says, and sips her tea while Larry makes faces at her.

+

The hero and heroine have sex at the end of pretty much every action or horror film Larry owns; well, more accurately, the hero and the woman who’s been there mostly to be rescued and wear implausible outfits have sex. Sally isn’t sure that she wanted to have sex after not being stolen by Angels; she kind of wanted to sleep for about thirty years in a room with no one else in it, no way in, no way out.

It wasn’t that, then, that made this happen: Sunday morning with Sally’s cold feet pressed into Larry’s, both of them daring each other to get up and put on the kettle. Maybe it was mutual understanding, the need to cling to someone else who’d seen what they’d seen – Larry put some feelers out online, but, well, there’s the probability that no one who has seen an Angel move is around any kind of internet anymore – and maybe it was something else that made Sally finally think: _this. This can be mine_.

(“Me?” Larry asked doubtfully, his fingers linked through hers, as the Doctor left with the file and the future and the past were finally slotted into their rightful places.

“You,” Sally replied, and grinned, suddenly, flicking her gaze over him in a sly sweep. “You can’t say I haven’t seen everything I’m getting into.”

He flushed, but squeezed her hand, and it was ridiculous and enough and she’d have scoffed, if she’d read it in a book; in her real life, she laughed.)

Sally pads through their flat, small and semi-tidy and crammed full of their separate and twined passions. Her copy of _House of Leaves_ is lying on top of Larry’s Babylon 5 boxset, last night’s mugs resting by them both. Pieces of a life they’ve built in this world where nothing’s the same anymore.

She puts the kettle on and shoves some bread in the toaster, checks her phone, and catches sight of herself; knickers and Larry’s old _The Angels Have The Phonebox_ t-shirt, washed soft and faded, the truth not detracting from a frankly cool catchphrase.

Larry’s right, of course. They’ve been part of something bigger, whether they want to be or not. There’s no locking the door on that one, whatever they do.

+

“I’m not saying we should actively seek them out,” Larry explains, fish and chips and _Metropolis_ after work, they’re _that_ couple now, apparently. “I’m just…”

“Suggesting we help people the Angels are going after does suggest looking them out,” Sally counters. “I mean, we’re surrounded by statues anyway, how are we going to find some particular ones?”

Larry shrugs. “Graveyards?”

“You do know we’re not Fred and Daphne, right?” Sally says.

“Pretty sure we’re Shaggy and Velma,” Larry replies.

“Speak for yourself,” Sally tells him, flicks her hair to make him laugh. “Seriously, though, you want to go hang out in graveyards where the internet says people have gone missing? I mean, even if we don’t find Angels, that’s just asking for horrible murdery things to happen.”

“Yeah, I want a minimum of horrible murdery things,” Larry agrees. He waves helpless hands. “I just think we should use what we know.”

“What _do_ we know?” Sally asks. “I mean, we don’t have a magic spaceship phonebox. How would we even fight them?”

Larry looks thoughtful for a long moment. “Hammers?” he suggests at last.

“Hammers,” Sally repeats flatly.

She eats three chips and _Metropolis_ flickers on and at last Larry says: “you haven’t said no.”

“No,” Sally agrees mildly, “no, I haven’t said no.”

+


End file.
